Quick and dirty summary

People don't buy products, they hire and fire them according to jobs they need done in their lives. Using Jobs Theory as a lens helps you identify why customers use your product/service as well as shows you your true competition. All in all, a very insightful book that gives you the recipe for innovation and a language to talk about it.

Notebook for
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
Christensen, Clayton M.
Citation (APA): Christensen, C. M. (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Section 1: An Introduction to Jobs Theory
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“If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?
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When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.
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They were conceived, developed, and launched into the market with a clear understanding of how these products would help consumers make the progress they were struggling to achieve.
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That work led to my theory of disruptive innovation, 1 which explains the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high cost have become the status quo— eventually completely redefining the industry.
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If the company simply tried to average all the responses of the dads and the commuters, it would come up with a one- size- fits- none product that doesn’t do either of the jobs well.
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therein lies the “aha.” People hired milk shakes for two very different jobs during the day, in two very different circumstances. Each job has a very different set of competitors— in the morning it was bagels and protein bars and bottles of fresh juice, for example; in the afternoon, milk shakes are competing with a stop at the toy store or rushing home early to shoot a few hoops— and therefore was being evaluated as the best solution according to very different criteria. This implies there is likely not just one solution for the fast- food chain seeking to sell more milk shakes. There are two. A one- size- fits- all solution would work for neither.
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At its heart, we believe Jobs Theory provides a powerful way of understanding the causal mechanism of customer behavior, an understanding that, in turn, is the most fundamental driver of innovation success.
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Hello main concept of the book that Naval says will be repeated over and over with examples haha
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Disruption, a theory of competitive response to an innovation, provides valuable insights to managers seeking to navigate threats and opportunities. But it leaves unanswered the critical question of how a company should innovate to consistently grow. It does not provide guidance on specifically where to look for new opportunities, or specifically what products and services you should create that customers will want to buy.
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At its heart, Jobs Theory explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives: they do this to resolve highly important, unsatisfied jobs that arise. And this, in turn, explains why some innovations are successful and others are not.
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Jobs Theory not only provides a powerful guide for innovation, but also frames competition in a way that allows for real differentiation and long- term competitive advantage, provides a common language for organizations to understand customer behavior, and even enables leaders to articulate their company’s purpose with greater precision.
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Data-backed differentiation and company purpose is really a winner for me. I'll hire this book!
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We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.
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“circumstance” is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined— and a successful solution created— relative to the specific context in which it arises.
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The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.
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A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance.
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Successful innovations enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations. They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions.
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Jobs are never simply about the functional— they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones.
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Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work— not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends.
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Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom discrete “events.”
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What progress is that person trying to achieve? What are the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the desired progress?
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What are the circumstances of the struggle? Who, when, where, while doing what?
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What obstacles are getting in the way of the person making that progress?
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Are consumers making do with imperfect solutions through some kind of compensating behavior? Are they buying and using a product that imperfectly performs the job? Are they cobbling together a workaround solution involving multiple products? Are they doing nothing to solve their dilemma at all?
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How would they define what “quality” means for a better solution, and what tradeoffs are they willing to make?
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perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes
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For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.
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As you look at innovation through the lenses of the Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Job to Be Done. It may seem like a small distinction— just a few minutes of arc— but it matters a great deal. In fact, it changes everything.
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Do you understand the real reason why your customers choose your products or services? Or why they choose something else instead?
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LeBlanc and his team led a session of about twenty of the top online faculty and administrators and charted out the entire admissions process— from first inquiry to first class— on a whiteboard. “It looked like a schematic from a nuclear submarine!” he says. The team circled all the hurdles that SNHU was throwing up— or not helping to overcome— in that process, with an eye toward the unique job of online learners, their unique circumstances, and the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the job that were important to them. And then, one by one, they eliminated those hurdles and replaced them with experiences that would perfectly satisfy this job.
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A clear view of customers’ jobs means an organization should never overshoot what those customers are actually willing to pay for. On the contrary, we believe that when customers find the right product to respond to their Job to Be Done, they’re often willing to pay more—
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Organizations that lack clarity on what the real jobs their customers hire them to do can fall into the trap of providing one- size- fits- all solutions that ultimately satisfy no one.
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Deeply understanding jobs opens up new avenues for growth and innovation by bringing into focus distinct “jobs- based” segments— including groups of “nonconsumers” for which an acceptable solution does not currently exist. They choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly. Nonconsumption has the potential to provide a very, very big opportunity.
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Seeing your customers through a jobs lens highlights the real competition you face, which often extends well beyond your traditional rivals.
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What jobs are your customers hiring your products and services to get done?
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Are your products— or competitors'— overshooting what customers are actually willing to pay for?
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What experiences do customers seek in order to make progress— and what obstacles must be removed for them to be successful?
Section 2: The Hard Work—and Payoff—of Applying Jobs Theory
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Sony founder Akio Morita actually advised against market research, urging instead to “carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it.” Sony’s breakthrough Walkman cassette player was temporarily put on hold when market research indicated that consumers would never buy a tape player that didn’t have the capacity to record and that customers would be irritated by the use of earphones. But Morita ignored his marketing department’s warning, trusting his own gut instead. The Walkman went on to sell over 330 million units and created a worldwide culture of personal music devices.
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Understanding the unresolved jobs in your own life can provide fertile territory for innovation. Just look in the mirror— your life is very articulate. If it matters to you, it’s likely to matter to others.
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You can learn as much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead.
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I think I have as many jobs of not wanting to do something as ones that I want positively to do. I call them “negative jobs.” In my experience, negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities.
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You can learn a lot by observing how your customers use your products, especially when they use them in a way that is different from what your company has envisioned.
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Most companies focus disproportionately on the functional dimensions of their customers’ jobs; but you should pay equally close attention to uncovering the emotional and social dimensions, as addressing all three dimensions is critical to your solution nailing the job.
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If you are a consumer of your own company’s products, what jobs do you use them to get done? Where do you see them falling short of perfectly nailing your jobs, and why?
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Who is not consuming your products today? How do their jobs differ from those of your current customers? What’s getting in the way of these nonconsumers using your products to solve their jobs?
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Go into the field and observe customers using your products. In what circumstances do they use them? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the progress they are trying to make? Are they using them in unexpected ways? If so, what does this reveal about the nature of their jobs?
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Consumers can’t always articulate what they want. And even when they do, their actions may tell a different story.
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if what consumers say is unreliable, can’t you just look at the data instead? Isn’t that objective? Well, data is prone to misinterpretation.
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The most commonly tracked is what we call the “Big Hire”— the moment you buy the product. But there’s an equally important moment that doesn’t show up in most sales data: when you actually “consume” it.
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The moment a consumer brings a purchase into his or her home or business, that product is still waiting to be hired again— we call this the “Little Hire.”
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How many apps do you have on your phone that seemed like a good idea to download, but you’ve more or less never used them again? If the app vendor simply tracks downloads, it’ll have no idea whether its app is doing a good job solving your desire for progress or not.
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Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired?
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The forces opposing change: There are two unseen, yet incredibly powerful, forces at play at the same time that many companies ignore completely: the forces holding a customer back. First, “habits of the present” weigh heavily on consumers. “I’m used to doing it this way.” Or living with the problem. “I don’t love it, but I’m at least comfortable with how I deal with it now.” And potentially even more powerful than the habits of the present is, second, the “anxiety of choosing something new.” “What if it’s not better?”
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the principal pull of the old is that it requires no deliberation and has some intuitive plausibility as a solution already. Loss aversion— people’s tendency to want to avoid loss— is twice as powerful psychologically as the allure of gains, as demonstrated by Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
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the pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new.
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when the decision involves firing something that has emotional and social dimensions to solving the job, that something is far harder to let go. No matter how frustrated we are with our current situation or how enticing a new product is, if the forces that pull us to hiring something don’t outweigh the hindering forces, we won’t even consider hiring something new.
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The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in peoples’ lives— those are the what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions. You’re looking for surprises, unexpected behaviors, compensating habits, and unusual product uses. The how— and this is a place where many marketers trip up— are ground- level, granular, extended narratives with a sample size of one. Remember, the insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a statistic. They’re rich and complex. Ultimately, you want to cluster together stories to see if there are similar patterns, rather than break down individual interviews into categories.
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uncovering jobs is about clustering insights, not having a single eureka. But we can start to form hypotheses and ask fresh questions, as well as think about what we might probe on subsequent interviews.
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One of the fundamental mistakes that many marketers make is to collect a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents when what they really need— and this interview illustrates— is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.
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Related: the power of small batches
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A genuine insight, as neuromarketing expert Gerald Zaltman, a colleague at Harvard Business School, says, is a thought that is experienced as true on conception. When you have an insight, you don’t have to convince yourself that it’s important or powerful. You just know.
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Related: Taleb saying that if you have to give more than one reason (or convince yourself) to choose an option then it's probably not an optimal (or antifragile?) solution. TODO: look for that passage in antifragile.
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breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.
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You are selling progress, not products.
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Deeply understanding a customer’s real Job to Be Done can be challenging in practice. Customers are often unable to articulate what they want; even when they do describe what they want, their actions often tell a completely different story.
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Seemingly objective data about customer behavior is often misleading, as it focuses exclusively on the Big Hire (when the customer actually buys a product) and neglects the Little Hire (when the customer actually uses it). The Big Hire might suggest that a product has solved a customer’s job, but only a consistent series of Little Hires can confirm it.
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Check usage, not just purchase funnel.
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Before a customer hires any new product, you have to understand what he’ll need to fire in order to hire yours. Companies don’t think about this enough. Something always needs to get fired.
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Hearing what a customer can’t say requires careful observation of and interactions with customers, all carried out while maintaining a “beginner’s mind.” This mindset helps you to avoid ingoing assumptions that could prematurely filter out critical information.
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As part of your storyboard, it’s critically important to understand the forces that compel change to a new solution, including the “push” of the unsatisfied job itself and the “pull” of the new solution.
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If the forces opposing change are strong, you can often innovate the experiences you provide in a way that mitigates them, for example by creating experiences that minimize the anxiety of moving to something new.
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Can you tell a complete story about how your customers go from a circumstance of struggle, to firing their current solution, and ultimately hiring yours (both the Big and the Little Hires)? Where are there gaps in your storyboard and how can you fill them in?
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What are the forces that impede potential customers from hiring your product? How could you innovate the experiences surrounding your product to overcome these forces?
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New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.
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Creating experiences and overcoming obstacles is how a product becomes a service to the customer, rather than simply a product with better features and benefits.
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This. Extends to management as well. As a manager, you must create experiences that allow employees to help customers with their JTBD, as well as remove obstacles that prevent them from doing so.
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Organizations that focus on making the product itself better and better are missing what may be the most powerful causal mechanism of all— what are the experiences that customers seek in not only purchasing, but also in using this product? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re probably not going to be hired.
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Purpose brand makes very clear which features and functions are relevant to the job and which potential improvements will ultimately prove irrelevant. A purpose brand is not solely valuable to the customer in making his choices. Purpose brands create enormous opportunities for differentiation, premium pricing, and growth. A clear purpose brand guides the company’s product designers, marketers, and advertisers as they develop and market improved products. As I’ll discuss in the next two chapters, having a Job to Be Done as a North Star helps guide an organization to design the right product and experiences to achieve that job— and not “overshoot” in a way that consumers won’t value. Achieving a purpose brand is the cherry on the top of the jobs cake. Purpose brand, when done well, provides the ultimate competitive advantage. Look no further. Don’t even bother shopping for anything else. Just hire me and your job will be done.
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You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, which includes the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress; the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make; the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten; and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome. The job spec becomes the blueprint that translates all the richness and complexity of the job into an actionable guide for innovation.
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Complete solutions to jobs must include not only your core product or service, but also carefully designed experiences of purchase and use that overcome any obstacles a customer might face in hiring your solution and firing another. This means that ultimately all successful solutions to jobs can be thought of as services, even for product companies.
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What are the most critical details that must be included in the job spec for your target job? Do you understand the obstacles that get in customers’ way? Do your current solutions address all these details?
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What are the experiences of purchase and use that your customers currently have? How well do these align with the requirements of their complete job spec? Where are there opportunities to improve them?
Section 3: The Jobs to Be Done Organization
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processes touch everything about the way an organization transforms its resources into value: the patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making through which they accomplish these transformations are processes. Product development, procurement, market research, budgeting, employee development and compensation, and resource allocation are all accomplished through processes. Helping customers have a delightful experience using your product is made up of processes. What information do we need to have in order to decide what to do next? Who is responsible for each step? What do we prioritize over other things?
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Resources, generally speaking, are fungible. They can be bought and sold. Products can, often, be easily copied. But it is through integrating processes to get the job done that companies can create the ideal experiences and confer competitive advantage.
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Processes are invisible from a customer’s standpoint— but the results of those processes are not. Processes can profoundly affect whether a customer chooses your product or service in the long run. And they may be a company’s best bet to ensure that the customer’s job, and not efficiency or productivity, remains the focal point for innovation in the long run. Absence of a process, as is the case with most traditional hospitals, is actually still a process. Things are getting done, however chaotically. But that’s not a good sign. W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”
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This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.
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Jobs Theory changes not only what you optimize your processes to do, but also how you measure their success. It shifts the critical performance criteria from internal financial- performance metrics to externally relevant customer- benefit metrics.
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Don't ever forget this: you're there to provide value to the customer!
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Having the right measurements in place helps institutionalize a process. It’s how your employees know they’re doing the right thing, making the right choices. As the old saying goes, “What gets measured, gets done.” From its inception, Amazon has laser- focused on three things that solve customers’ jobs— vast selection, low prices, and fast delivery— and designed processes to deliver them. Those processes include measuring and monitoring how it’s achieving those three ultimate goals on a minute- by- minute basis. The end goal is getting the customers’ jobs done— everything works backward from there. “We always start with the customers and look at all the metrics that matter for the customer,” explains Amazon’s senior vice president for international retail Diego Piacentini.
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The important thing is to be attached to the job, but not the way we solve it today. Processes must flex over time when a better understanding of customer jobs calls for a revised orientation. Otherwise you’ll risk changing the concept of the job to fit the process, rather than the other way around.
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This is interesting. It's basically future-proofing the company. If you're focused on solving a job primarily, you won't ever become one of those stupid, large, bureaucratic companies that lose its way.
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Aligning with jobs is considering what “process optimization” means. In so doing, you avoid the trap of allowing today’s critical processes to become tomorrow’s inhibitors to growth.
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Ford’s core mistake— of focusing on the product spec rather than the job spec— gets repeated all the time. In fact, the misstep is so common in the high- tech world, that Anshu Sharma of Storm Ventures has earned justifiable recognition for calling attention to the problem, which he has dubbed “stack fallacy.” Stack fallacy highlights the tendency of engineers to overweight the value of their own technology and underweight the downstream applications of that technology to solve customer problems and enable desired progress. “Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layers above yours,” Sharma says. It’s the reason that companies fail so often when they try to move up the stack. “They don’t have first- hand empathy for what customers of the product one level above theirs in the stack actually want. They’re disconnected from the context in which their product will actually be used.” Stack fallacy applies outside of the technology sphere, too. For instance, it might be easy for you to have a vegetable garden. You know what herbs and vegetables you like— and all you have to do is to learn how to grow them and use them in your own cooking. On the other hand, your understanding of growing and using herbs does not prepare you to open and run a restaurant. In fact, eight out of ten restaurants fail within five years. Knowledge of production, Sharma says, is not the same thing as knowing what customers are looking for.
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In short, stack fallacy and Jobs Theory shine light on the same hazard: to mistake technical know- how— which Ford and Qualcomm had in spades— for the customer’s Job to Be Done, about which they understood very little.
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A lot of engineers, even good ones, make this mistake. "We could code this in a day!"
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the key to successful innovation is to create and deliver the set of experiences corresponding to your customer’s job spec. To do this consistently, a company needs to develop and integrate the right set of processes that deliver these experiences. Doing so can yield a powerful source of competitive advantage that is very difficult for others to copy.
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A powerful lever to drive job- centric process development and integration is to measure and manage to new metrics aligned with nailing the customer’s job. Managers should ask what elements of the experience are the most critical to the customer, and define metrics that track performance against them.
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For insync is this syncing speed and reliability?
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How you solve for a customer’s job will inevitably change over time; you need to build in flexibility to your processes, to allow them to continuously adapt and improve the experiences you deliver.
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How does your organization ensure that the customer’s job guides all critical decisions related to product development, marketing, and customer service?
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Do the different functions that are part of your customer’s experience (for example, your product, service, marketing, sales, after- sale service) all support nailing your customer’s job in a coordinated, integrated way, or are they in conflict?
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Regarded as one of the most influential management books of all time, Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein transforms the abstract concept of culture into a tool that can be used to better shape the dynamics of organization and change.
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Catmull, Ed. “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.”
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A 2010 Bain & Company study of fifty- seven major reorganizations found that fewer than one- third produced any meaningful improvement in performance. Some actually destroyed value.
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In his 2009 book The Checklist Manifesto, Harvard Medical School professor Atul Gawande chronicled dramatic improvement in patient safety simply by virtue of creating and following a process— checklists— in patient care.
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Just like Kahneman re simple systems.
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Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man- made.
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Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support. In fact, Nate Silver, a well- known statistician and founder of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight (it was acquired by ESPN in 2013), noted, “The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.” 8
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The healthiest mindset for innovation is that nearly all data— whether presented in the form of a large quantitative data set on one extreme, or an ethnographic description of behavior on the other— is built upon human bias and judgment. Numerical and verbal data alike are abstractions from a much more complex reality, out of which a researcher attempts to pull the most salient variables or patterns for examination.
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Whereas the subjectivity of data from field- based, ethnographic research is glaringly apparent, the subjective bias of numerical data hides behind its superficial precision.
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Data is not the phenomena. The primary function of data is to represent the phenomena— to create a simulation of reality. But there is a misconception about data that is so prevalent it’s tacitly embedded in many organizations— the idea that only quantitative data is objective. There’s a pervasive belief that there is some set of ideal data that can, together, yield the perfect insights about customers. It’s just a matter of figuring what the right data is. In short, we can know “truth” if we just gather the right data in quantitative form, the kind of information that can be fed into a spreadsheet or regression analysis. How many? What? Where? Who? When? By contrast, qualitative data— observations and insights that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet to be sliced and diced— is not as reliable as quantitative, because there’s no single “truth” at the core. Quantitative data, the thinking goes, is somehow better.
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Deity does not create data and then bestow it upon mankind. All data is man- made. Somebody, at some point, decided what data to collect, how to organize it, how to present it, and how to infer meaning from it— and it embeds all kinds of false rigor into the process. Data has the same agenda as the person who created it, wittingly or unwittingly.
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Google Flu Trends had wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States for more than two years. The article, “The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis,” concluded that the errors were, at least in part, due to the decisions made by GFT engineers about what to include in their models— mistakes the academics dubbed “algorithmic dynamics” and “big data hubris.”
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Despite the best intentions and a century of marketing wisdom, companies start to act as if their business is defined by the products and services they sell (“ quarter- inch drills”) instead of the jobs that they solve (“ quarter- inch holes”).
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The Fallacy of Active Data Versus Passive Data: Instead of staying cognizant of and focused on the type of data that characterizes the rich complexity of the job (passive data), growing companies start to generate operations- related data (active data), which can seduce managers with its apparent objectivity and rigor but which tends to organize itself around products and customer characteristics, rather than Jobs to Be Done.
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The Fallacy of Surface Growth: As companies make big investments in customer relationships, they focus their energies on driving growth through selling additional products to those customers or solving a broader set of their jobs, what we call surface growth— as opposed to staying focused on solving the core job better.
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The Fallacy of Conforming Data: Managers focus on generating data that conforms to their preexisting business models.
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we have a system that only treats sickness— it’s not a “health” care system; it’s a “sick” care system. They’re not the same thing. When we get sick, all of a sudden the data about us that the doctors see kicks into high gear and the system organizes around making that data look better. But that’s not the same thing as keeping us healthy in the first place. This is the same thing that managers do— they respond to changes in data, but don’t pay attention to the passive data that is steeped in the context of the most important thing the manager should be focusing on: the customer’s jobs.
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Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision making, the rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.
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Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail— But Some Don’t.
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powerful lesson he learned at HBS, how to inspire people by creating the right culture.
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when the job has a voice in an organization, individual work streams have meaning and employees understand why their work matters. A well- articulated job provides a kind of “commander’s intent,” obviating the need for micromanagement because employees at all levels understand and are motivated by how the work they do fits into a larger process to help customers get their jobs done.
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Enable distributed decision making with clarity of purpose— employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good jobs- focused decisions and to be autonomous and innovative.
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Measure what matters most— customer progress, employee contributions, and incentives.
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“We can measure lots of things. But what you measure matters.”
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A successful start- up is typically organized around the job, which tends to make it look like a small group of people each wearing multiple hats and sharing an understanding for what the entity is delivering that enables the customer to make progress. In short, the organizing unit in a start- up is the customer’s job.
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the further removed managers are from the customer context, the easier it is to slip into a highly edited view of the external world.
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Understanding the most important jobs your company solves for customers can be translated into a rallying cry that aligns individuals across the organization behind a common purpose and functions as an enduring innovation North Star.
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Distributed decision making: Employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good decisions that align with the job, and to be autonomous and innovative.
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Resource optimization: The jobs focus shines a light on which resources are aligned against what matters most and which are not, and enables them to be rebalanced accordingly.
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Inspiration: Solving a customer’s job is inherently inspiring to individuals in an organization, as it enables them to see how their work enables real people to make progress in their lives.
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Better measurement: With a focus on the job, people will naturally seek to measure and manage to more customer- centric metrics.
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How broadly understood are these jobs across your organization? Are they reflected in your mission statement or other key company communications?
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Do your leaders consistently communicate the centrality of these jobs?
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How could you embed these jobs in all your leadership communications, your corporate communications, and your culture?
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In the theory of disruption, the key to defining the essence of disruption was being able to visualize trajectories of how technological progress and market needs interact.
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A wonderful book, Relevance Lost by H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan, 1 shows that there is a complicated story behind every number. These stories are hidden when they are parsed and distilled into numbers. When the stories are told, they are rich in data. The insights from the right cases are deep. Numbers that were distilled from stories offer insights that are often shallow but broad.
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Right. By nature, extracting numbers from stories is lossy compression.
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A well- defined Job to Be Done is expressed in verbs and nouns— such as, “I need to ‘write’ books verbally, obviating the need to type or edit by hand.” In contrast, the sentence “We should aspire to be more honest” is a noble goal, but it’s not a job.
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defining a job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful.
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if the architecture of the system or product can only be met by products within the same product class, the concept of the Job to Be Done does not apply. If only products in the same class can solve the problem, you’re not uncovering a job.
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“I need to have a chocolate milk shake that is in a twelve- ounce disposable container” is not a job. The possible candidates that I could hire to do this are all in the milk shake product category.
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“I need something that will keep me occupied with what’s happening on the road while I drive. And also, I’d like this to fill me up so that I’m not hungry during a 10: 00 a.m. meeting. I could hire a banana, doughnuts, bagels, Snickers, or a coffee to do this job.” The candidates to do the job are all from different product categories; and our rule of thumb is that this is the right level of abstraction.
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Another illustration: “I need a thin sheet of material that we can wrap around a house just before we apply shingles, siding, or bricks. It needs to have a high coefficient of friction; a low coefficient of thermal conduction; and a high coefficient of toughness— so that it won’t rip as we wrap the house. Oh— and it also must be impervious to moisture.” This isn’t a job, it’s a technical specification.
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“We’re building a new house here in Boston, where the cold, damp air of winter and the hot, humid air of summer both easily penetrate walls. I want my family to feel warm and cozy in my home in the winter— and cool and dry in the summer. I need to insulate the outside walls of this house so I can minimize the costs of heating and air- conditioning.” I could hire wood (paper) pulp and blow it into the space in my walls to do this job. I could also hire rolls of fiberglass insulation and staple it to the studs in the wall. Or I could hire Tyvek by Dupont. And to nail things down even tighter, I could hire Tyvek and rolls of fiberglass together. Or I could plan on compensating with extra sweaters in the winter and throwing open more windows in the summer. Maybe I should buy a couple of dehumidifiers and fans. Or maybe I could just hire Santa Barbara or San Francisco, where Mother Nature has obviated the problem of insulation— and I could move there.
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the job of most people is that they want to be so healthy that they don’t even have to think about health. Yet, in systems where the providers of care are reimbursed for services they provide, they actually make money when the members of their system get sick— it’s effectively “sick care” rather than “health care.” When the members are healthy, the providers make little. In other words, the Jobs to Be Done of members and providers are not aligned in the US health care system.
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assuming responsibility for the cost of care— by insuring consumers, for instance. The organizations’ financial sustainability therefore depends on keeping consumers as healthy as possible over the course of their relationship with providers; and this dependency enables jobs- focused innovation around disease prevention, and care efficiency and effectiveness, to flourish.
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Peter Drucker famously cautioned us: “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him.”